Blood is a living, complex, and in many respects unstable system, and any processes which seek to separate or affect the characteristics of its constituents must be carried out with due concern for these properties. Many medical procedures are based upon the separation of whole blood into particular constituents, whether processing homogeneous masses such as plasma or extracting formed or discrete elements such as red blood cells, platelets and leukocytes. More recently there has been a great increase in therapeutic treatments (therapeutic apheresis) in which different components in the blood complex can be processed or removed to attenuate diseases or destroy harmful organisms. The separation of the constituents of whole blood, without damage, is fundamental to the plasma collection industry, therapeutic apheresis, and numerous biomedical procedures. Blood separation processes have been widely investigated and discussed in the scientific and patent literature, not only because of their importance but because they present particularly critical and difficult examples of the general problem of separating and removing suspended constituents from a solution.
Workers in the art have relied on one of two fundamentally different approaches, namely centrifugation and membrane separation, to separate the constituents of blood. Centrifugation, or stratification under the influence of centrifugal forces, may be realized on a continuous as well as a batch basis. Adequate centrifugation intervals provide a high degree of stratification and high yields. For continuous centrifugation a probe or other separator mechanism in the path of a particular layer (e.g. plasma) removes the selected constituent. However, long residence times, typically several minutes to several hours, and sometimes objectionable additives as well are required for sharply defined stratification. Even with long residence times some residual concentration of cells may remain in the plasma or extracted cellular component. In addition, rotating seals must be used that are exposed to the liquid in such a way that they present difficulties with insterility, leakage and contamination. The presence of a probe or other outlet in a continuous centrifuge system requires some membrane or filter shielding to prevent drawing off undesired constituents with the selected stratified layer. Because such a membrane or filter becomes exposed to a highly concentrated cellular mass that tends to be drawn toward the orifice, and because of the active propensity of blood constituents for adhering to and coating foreign substances, plugging or blocking of the conduits ultimately occurs.
Centrifugation can be used to obtain in excess of 90% recovery of a selected constituent such as plasma, and is the most widely employed system despite the problems mentioned and the manual steps required. Some commercial hemapheresis systems are based upon membrane filtration techniques because disposable modules can be used to provide essentially cell free fluid separations quite rapidly. Filtration rates and recoveries have been improved by flowing whole blood tangential to a membrane, with viscous shear acting on the flow so as to prevent red cells (in the case of plasma extraction) from exuding into the membrane pores to plug them. The application of the shear principle to separation of blood, previously known in other fields, was apparently first proposed for the separation of plasma by Blatt et al in an article entitled "Solute Polarization and Cake Formation in Membrane Ultrafiltration: Cause, consequences and control techniques", in Membrane Science and Technology, Plenum Press, N.Y. 1970, pp. 47-97, and by Blatt in U.S. Pat. No. 3,705,100. Intensive investigation of the literature has led to widely recognized understandings that certain parameters are crucial. These are the shear rate, the hematocrit (percentage of cells), plasma flux per unit area, transmembrane pressure, blood flow resistance, sieving coefficient (percent of species transmitted) and hemolysis (measured as percent hemaglobin in plasma). The limiting factors on performance are regarded in the literature as being deposition or "fouling" and polarization concentration. The former factor pertains to the plugging of membrane pores by the entrapment or adhesion of cellular or protein matter, or both, and the latter relates to the limits imposed on transport of blood constituents when a high concentration of suspended matter exists near the membrane. As plasma is withdrawn from whole blood the hematocrit increases so that with 90% plasma recovery and a hematocrit of 50%, for example, the return to the donor is about 91% cells, which comprises an extremely concentrated cell mass. Even with the best designed prior art systems, the flow of plasma through the membrane is more than approximately two orders of magnitude smaller than would be the flow through a membrane exposed only to pure plasma. The formed elements in suspension in the blood clearly are the cause of such limitations. In consequence, large membrane areas are required to recover relatively modest amounts of plasma (e.g. 50% of inflowing plasma for hematocrits below 40%, with top yields of 20 to 30 ml/min) and the efficiencies of these systems are even lower for donors having normal hematocrit levels (37 to 47 for females and 40 to 54 for males). The technique, sometimes used, of diluting blood to substantially lower hematocrit levels by the use of anticoagulants, is undesirable both for the collected plasma and for the donor.
Much attention has been paid to the shear rate and a number of low shear devices (below 1000 sec.sup.-1) of large area are now in use. These devices have been described by workers such as Werynski et al in an article entitled "Membrane Plasma Separation - Toward Improved Clinical Operation" in Trans. Am. Soc. Art. Int. Organs, 27: 539-42 (1981), and Schindhelm et al in "Mass Transfer Characteristics Of Plasma Filtration Membranes" published in Trans. ASAIO, 27: 554-8 (1981). The articles indicate that the low shear systems, typically with shear rates of 500 sec.sup.-1 or less, are limited primarily by concentration polarization. At the opposite limit, for high shear devices (e.g. greater than 2000 sec.sup.-1) as discussed in detail by Blatt, cited above, deposition is the limiting factor. This conclusion is supported by an article by Castino et al in Publication No. 395, Blood Research Laboratory, American National Red Cross, (also published as Final Report NA/BL Contract No. 1-HB-6-2928) entitled "Microporous Membrane Plasmapheresis", by an article entitled "Continuous Flow Membrane Filtration Of Plasma From Whole Blood" by Solomon et al in Trans. ASAIO, 24: 21 (1978), by U.S. Pat. No. 4,191,182 to Popovich, and by U.S. Pat. No. 4,212,742 to Solomon.
Despite widespread and intensive study of high shear systems, however, there has been little commercial use thus far, and upon analysis this appears to be due to a number of conflicting factors. A reasonable plasma recovery (e.g. 75%) demands excessive membrane area because, among other things, as hematocrit increases plasma flux efficiency falls, while blood viscosity increases substantially. To overcome these factors by increasing shear would require overly high blood flow rates obtained, as in Castino or Solomon cited above, by recirculating the blood. Also excessively small gap dimensions would be needed along with obligatory high transmembrane pressure due to blood flow resistance. Such systems are thus inherently limited in capability while the low shear high area systems are expensive when adequately sized.
After extensive work on and analysis of blood separation problems, including plasma collection, applicant has devised a blood separation technique in which a rotary concentric membrane structure imparts angular velocity to the interior surface of an annular blood volume bounded closely on the opposite side by a concentric stationary wall. Remarkable improvements are achieved in terms of plasma recovery rates, plasma purity, independence from hematocrit level, speed of operation and cost. The system and method drastically differ from both the centrifugation and the membrane filtration techniques previously utilized in this field.
Subsequent to applicant's discoveries and development work, applicant has undertaken a broad search of the patent and scientific literature in order to acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship of his system to apparatus and methods used in other fields. A significant number of disclosures have been found which spin a rotatable filter drum or cylinder within a bath of a liquid system in which other material (e.g. sediment or particle matter) is entrained or suspended. The spinning is used to throw off higher density particulates and suspended matter that impinge upon and plug the filter. The following patents comprise examples of this approach:
______________________________________ U.S. Pat. No. 1,664,769 Chance 1928 U.S. Pat. No. 2,197,509 Reilly et al 1940 U.S. Pat. No. 2,398,233 Lincoln 1946 U.S. Pat. No. 2,709,500 Carter 1955 U.S. Pat. No. 3,355,382 Huntington 1967 U.S. Pat. No. 3,491,887 Maestrelli 1970 U.S. Pat. No. 3,568,835 Hansen 1971 U.S. Pat. No. 3,821,108 Manjikian 1974 U.S. Pat. No. 3,830,372 Manjikian 1974 U.S. Pat. No. 3,833,434 Gayler 1975 ______________________________________
There have also been various investigations in other fields of the use of a rotating filter member in conjunction with an outer wall for purposes of imposing shear, examples of which are as follows:
"Description of a Rotating Ultrafiltration Module", B. Hallstrom et al in Desalination (Netherlands) . Vol. 24, pp. 273-279 (1978).
"Ultrafiltration at Low Degrees of Concentration Polarization: Technical Possibilities", M. Lopez-Leiva in Desalination, Vol. 35, pp. 115-128 (1980).
These two publications relate to the handling of solutions, rather than suspensions, and induce shear solely for specific purposes, such as reverse osmosis. Centrifugation is not an operative factor in these systems.
The patents and publications listed above are derived from a wide spectrum of arts and technologies which are often nonanalogous, even to each other. They primarily deal with stable liquid systems which can be treated strenuously without harmful effects. The teachings of these different publications thus cannot be translated to the myriad problems involved in the separation or fractionation of blood constituents. The danger of trauma, the particular adherent qualities of blood, and the significant changes in properties that arise as a separation process proceeds all characterize blood fractionation problems as not only critical but in fact unique.
Applicant also points out that the broad field of blood processing includes oxygenation techniques, and that some oxygenation systems incorporate rotating membranes, as described in:
"An Experimental Study of Mass Transfer in Rotating Cuvette Flow with Low Axial Reynolds Number" by Strong et al in Can. Jnl. of Chem. Eng., Vol. 54, pp. 295-298 (1976).
______________________________________ U.S. Pat. No. 3,674,440 Kitrilakis 1972 U.S. Pat. No. 3,183,908 Collins et al 1965 U.S. Pat. No. 3,026,871 Thomas 1962 U.S. Pat. No. 3,771,658 Brumfield 1973 U.S. Pat. No. 3,771,899 Brumfield 1973 U.S. Pat. No. 4,212,741 Brumfield 1980 ______________________________________
These patents illustrate some of the special care and expedients that must be employed in handling blood, but they propose and utilize techniques which have previously been considered inimical to blood separation objectives, such as flow vortices and other non-laminar effects.